Category Archives: winemaking

Making A Yeast Starter

10 Replies

Why make a starter?

You can get good results from wine yeast by just sprinkling a newly opened packet directly onto your must. There are times, however, that you really ought to use a starter. Yeast become active and start reproducing much more quickly and reliably in a starter, so in difficult (for the yeast) situations, like trying to restart a stuck fermentation or if you doubt the viability of your yeast (because it’s been sitting on a shelf for years, for example, or you ordered it during a freak heatwave and it may have gotten cooked in a delivery truck somewhere), a starter is worth the effort. You may also want to make a starter if you need your yeast to dominate the must quickly. Maybe you don’t like to use sulfite or you had to leave your must sitting for longer than you expected before you could pitch your yeast.

Some people use starters routinely. This is probably unnecessary, but it doesn’t hurt.

How do you make a starter?

First, you should rehydrate your yeast according to the directions on the package.


Rehydrating Yeast


In the photo, I’ve sprinkled the yeast into a quarter cup (about 50 ml) of warm water and let it sit for five minutes. Coming out of dormancy is stressful, and a lot of yeast cells die. Warm water, with no additives like nutrient or sugar, is the least stressful way to do it and results in the largest population of live yeast.

While you’re waiting, dissolve a tablespoon of sugar (12 grams) and a pinch of nutrient in a cup 2.5 fluid ounces (75 ml) of water. Once your yeast is rehydrated, add it to the sugar water. You should see signs of activity in less than an hour.


After 30 minutes, bubbles appear on the surface of the yeast starter. They are predominantly in the center and cover about 25% of the surface.


In about four hours, it should be active and foamy and you can add it to your must.


The yeast starter is four hours old now and bubbles cover the surface.


You can let it continue for a up to a day, but there is probably no advantage in it. Any benefit from additional growth will be offset by having your must sit around with no yeast in it. If you do want to let the starter grow for a while, maybe because you made the starter before you prepared your must, then keep an eye on it every few hours and add sugar water, 1 tablespoon (12 g) sugar to each half cup (120 ml) if activity subsides. If you made the starter to restart a stuck fermentation, it’s better to add must to the starter, in a new fermenter, gradually.

Update 7/13/2010 – Changed the recommended sugar concentration

My original recipe for a starter was about 5% sugar, but I now use 10%. That’s about two tablespoons (24 g) of sugar to each cup (240 ml) of water. The yeast will have something to chew on either way, but 10% sugar is about halfway to the 20% or so common in wine musts. That makes it less of a drastic change. It means the starter might take a little longer, and can be left a little longer, before pitching.



White Wine From Tomatoes!

Leave a reply

Different for a reason: Why I’ll make it white

When most people think about tomato wine, they – ok, most people don’t think about tomato wine, but if they did they would – think about red wine. It’s the same way with cherry wine, and just as I wrote about white cherry wine a few days ago, I’m going to make the case for white tomato wine today.

Since I’ve neither made nor tasted tomato wine before, I’m a little concerned about the taste. If there are objectionable flavors, then I think they’re most likely to come from the skin and pulp. A white wine is just fermented juice, so that would avoid the flavor compounds, good or bad, in the skins. As for the pulp, I’d want to stay away from sauce tomatoes, like Romas. In the end, I chose to make a clean dry white from Gold Nugget tomatoes. Gold Nugget is a cherry tomato with yellow/orange skin and yellow flesh that’s a reliable producer in this climate.

How to make it: Good fruit, balanced acid, and the right amount of alcohol

I have ten vines in the ground, and I don’t know how big a harvest to expect. I’ll pick each tomato when it’s ripe and put the day’s harvest right into the freezer. It won’t come in all at once, though, so I’ll store the fruit until the harvest is complete. That’s not the only thing about tomatoes that’s different from grapes. Tomatoes are about 95% water, by weight, compared to 80% for grapes.

The dominant acid in tomatoes is citric, rather than tartaric. I haven’t been able to find information on the acidity of tomato juice, but if the TA is low, then I’ll have to add acid to the must. In that case, I can choose one, or a combination, of the three major organic acids found in most fruit: citric, malic, and tartaric. Winemakers always use tartaric acid for any additions to conventional grape wine, but there are two schools of thought for acid additions to non-grape wine. The first approach is to use the dominant acid in the fruit. In the case of tomato wine, that would be citric. Another idea is to use a complementary acid. That is, instead of the dominant acid, add one of the other two. So I could use either malic or tartaric with this method. Should I need to acidify, I’ll probably use tartaric. I think it’ll make the a wine a little more familiar by giving it a bit of conventional white wine character. Also, I understand that citric acid can make the wine more vulnerable to vinegar spoilage and that malic can be harsher than the other two.

There will be a lot less sugar in the tomato juice, than in grape juice. I understand 5-8 degrees brix is common, so I’ll be adding sugar. It’s pretty straightforward to find out how much sugar to add for a given amount of alcohol. The question is, how much alcohol should I target? I often aim for 12% alcohol, by volume, in my wines and meads. That would be about 22 brix and a specific gravity of 1.090. Some research, by the late Dr Kime of Cornell, suggests that fruit wine (I’ve never liked that term – grapes aren’t fruit?) is better below 10.5% alcohol. There isn’t a whole lot of research into non-grape wine, so when a little bit come along, I pay attention. I’m leaning towards 10% alcohol for my tomato wine (18-19 brix, SG = 1.075). I’ve still got some blanks to fill in, but I’m getting a pretty good “big picture” idea of how I’ll make my white tomato wine.

Thinking about the next step

If this is a success, then I can continue investigating tomato wine. I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but I can see a red tomato wine next year. Red wine is all about the skins, and smaller fruit has more skin, pound for pound, than larger fruit. That’s why wine grapes are a lot smaller than the table grapes in the grocery store. So I would need cherry or grape tomatoes, for red wine, with deep dark color. I wonder if there are any dark colored small tomatoes that do well in this climate? I don’t know, but if my white tomato wine is a winner, then I’ve got plenty more to think about!

Update 12/22/2007: I finally did it!

The acidity of tomato juice is low, and I added tartaric acid just as I planned. I changed my mind about targeting a low alcohol level, and decided that my first tomato wine should be a more “normal” 12% alcohol. You can read all the details here.



Rhubarb Wine

4 Replies

I remember when I was offered my first taste of rhubarb wine. I had never sampled non-grape wine (country wine) before, but my thoughts changed from “is this a joke?” to “how much of this have you got?” with the first sip. I have since planted rhubarb in my garden, and I’ve been making wine from it for two years. I owe a lot to the Hutterite colony in Montana, they still make that terrific wine, for their inspiration and generous advice.

Rhubarb stalks on the cutting board - 4/25/07

The first harvest of 2007 yielded 10 oz (about 275 grams), and I expect to harvest every month through August. I discard the leaves, chop up the stalks and freeze them. Once I’ve gathered the entire harvest (last year’s was 4lb or about 1.8 kg), I’ll begin work on my third vintage.